Net Worth

Net worth 

Noun:

".. the total wealth of an individual, company, or household, taking account of all financial assets and liabilities..."

Stripped of everything one owns, at that one moment, that final moment when all tangible assets no longer matter, defined by the expression, "you can't take it with you", how much is one really worth.  We can come up with at least one set of double meanings. We'll get into that.

First, we have this one clinical definition of net worth - efficient and unemotional, coldly detached - of the average human body.

Bill Bryson wrote in "The Body - A Guide For Occupants", his recollection while in high school in the 60s of what his biology teacher said the human body was worth based on the chemical elements that it was made from. His memory was hazy but he thought it was $13.50.  Perhaps, the teacher calculated that the human body is mostly water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, about 99 % in all and the rest of other unknown (at that time) elements that can be had from the local hardware store. Skin, tissue and bones were worth $13.50 in 1960's dollars that are now worth about $140, due to inflation over all the past decades, which is about 3,682,280 VND (Vietnamese Dong) or 11,156 Russian Rubles.

But wait, the Royal Society of Chemistry in London, using only the purest form of elements, such as about 30 pounds of really pure carbon, and additional amounts hydrogen and oxygen (water being H2O), iron and rare elements of thorium, etc., puts the the value of the human body at "precisely $151,578.46 plus sales tax".

However, in a PBS 2012 broadcast of NOVA, a science program, the value of the elements to make an average human body was only $168.

It just goes to show how imprecise it can be to put values on anything. (Let me acknowledge Bill Bryson's incisive attempt at coming up with something based on inexact estimates).

Anyhow, that's about what the average human body is worth. Dare we mix financial net worth with that?  Just for grins, let's do that.  Let's pick on Ariana Grande.  She could tiptoe to 5'-1" and perhaps tip the scales at 100 pounds.  Financially, her net worth is estimated at $250 million plus several Guinness World records. However, her widely gossiped weight loss put her physical net worth at the bottom rung of the ladder, quite well below the average run-of-the-mill sumo wrestler at between 250 to 450 pounds. But then top ranked sumo wrestlers could only earn $100 grand annually, while most will barely get $30 K a year. Grand champions can earn more but they won't cover Ariana's jet flights and limo service alone between concerts and shows.

That's what I meant by a set of double meanings for net worth. Which is, "neither here nor there", some of you might say.

Let's segue to something else. You are reading this because your DNA, which is the most durable and enduring part of your existence, managed to survive countless and uninterrupted cell divisions over eons. Had there been just a single break, you would not be here.  Think about that. Before your parents met to conceive you also means that each of their parents had to have met to go through the same process as did all the generations earlier who started the "ball rolling", so to speak, that kept on rolling that hopefully is still rolling because you gave it another push through your own child or children.

DNA is not only a road map that leads backwards in time and towards the future, but it is also a blueprint for making generations of inheritors yet to come. 

This microscopic double helix strand of material is so plentiful in the average human body that if connected end-to-end into a single strand will extend to 10 billion miles, way past the orbit of Pluto, Bill Bryson wrote.

In a sense, there  should never be a question about your net worth, despite what your bank account says.

Let's talk about the other net worth. There are, for example, intangible net worth of a person's accomplishments and contributions for societies' benefit. What value should put on Abraham Lincoln's and Martin Luther King's moral and social net worth?

What is the net worth of a physician who chose to practice in the poorest rural communities of Bangladesh, Bhutan, or the mountainous regions of Mindanao in the Philippines or Quitman or Tallahatchie in the Mississippi Delta in the wealthy USA? 

How do we compare the net worth of a Masai herder in Tanzania who owns a handful of cattle with  a Texas rancher?

 

We can't. And, should we? No.

In the end, it is really what net worth anyone has accumulated that he or she will be remembered for.  In other words, what intangible net worth we leave behind is what counts. Of course, both intangible and physical assets are governed by the same rule, "you can't take it with you". Or, can you? Perhaps, there is that kind of non-material DNA that is also passed on from generation to generation with  a far wider and far longer reach than material goods. That, I suspect, is why civilization is able to transcend beyond moral inequities.  And so we must hope.